chapter 3
If Mikesh thought he knew what my mother was talking about, he was wrong. As she looked into his face, her hair messed and eyes puffy, she was, for that moment cheerful, thinking of what she told my brother and me many times in the little house she ruled, her story of how she wasn’t sure we would make it into the world because of weather. How when she was carrying us she wasn’t due until late January. How she was on her own. How she and dad were going to marry. How Dad needed the cash, and went south to work some high-paying construction after hurricane Carmen hit in the fall. But Dad stopped calling or writing. My unmarried mom was left living with her parents on the farm, sleeping in the bedroom in which she had grown up, eating from the same flowered stoneware she had known from childhood. Except that now she was pregnant and the man who was responsible had left with a promise on his lips and then, like the hurricane he had followed, disappeared. It was 1974. Mom said they were not so careful about getting ready for babies in those days. She saw the doctor once, and only knew from that visit that she was pregnant and that the due date would be in the new year. Mom should have gone back, seen Dr. Razavi again, but she was stubborn and angry. She thought that before the end of the year, Dad would come back with enough money to set them up independently. They would marry, and as a new bride she would see the doctor. But Mom promised Grandma that at the end of December she would set up a new appointment, and make arrangements for the hospital stay by the time her due date arrived.
Late December of ‘74 was cold. No matter the season, my grandfather listened to the farm report and the weather at six o’clock every morning. The day before Josh and I were born, Grandpa announced to Mom and Grandma that a blizzard was forecast. On the morning that Grandpa announced the blizzard, Mom, in the frozen farm country of Clayton County, craved fresh pie cherries she could pick by hand in midsummer from the tree in her parents’ lawn, just a few yards away from the garden where beans would be ripe for the harvest under velvet leaves. Mom’s craving was so powerful that she felt like she would walk to get ripe cherries, even if she had to put one foot ahead of the other all the way to south Florida. But Grandpa was firm. The three of them were going to sit tight, make sure the animals were cared for and everything buttoned down, because heavy snow was coming on a strong wind. True to the forecast, by noon the air was white. While Grandma and Grandpa and Mom listened to the weather bulletins coming in on KOEL and the wind howled in the eaves, Mom daydreamed of biting through the fragile skins of cherries and wiping the juice from her lips. Around bedtime, when the storm was at its worst, her water broke and contractions started.
Mom had not yet turned nineteen, but she knew what was happening. Neither she nor my grandmother anticipated this would be her delivery date. Neither thought ahead to get Mom into town to be near Community Hospital. Grandma called Dr. Razavi. He said with a first baby it might be a long wait before Mom actually needed to get to Elkader. That night with Grandma on the phone, and the winds ready to shake the house off its foundations, the waves of pain knocked Mom sideways. When the contractions grew close, Razavi contacted the sheriff, who said it would be a slow business for the plows to get out to my grandparents’ road through the piling drifts. Their best bet for speed was for my grandparents to get Mom to the state highway, meeting the plow and ambulance there.
On its own, Grandpa’s tractor might have gotten through, but Mom was in no condition to climb on, and a wagon would get hung up in the snow. Then Grandpa thought about Nels Myhre’s sleigh. Nels had the roughest farmland in their neighborhood, steep, all woodland and pasture. Nels kept sheep and was the last farmer in the area to use horses. His place was one farm over. You’d have had to drive twenty miles to find another farmer who still kept work animals or a sleigh. But Nels used a bobsleigh to get hay bales out to the sheep in winter, driving a team of black half-Percherons who weren’t put off by snow. About three in the morning, Grandpa called Nels and asked if he thought the team and sleigh could make it. Nels would try. The snow had quit but was still blowing. Grandpa got out with his tractor and blade cleared the drive and their section of road. Grandma stayed with Mom. Around four o’clock Mom and Grandma heard the bells on the harnesses of Nels’s team. Nels, rosy-cheeked and frosted with snow, appeared in the kitchen door. “Elizabeth,” he told my grandma, “I’d ask for a cup of coffee, but we better get going.” Grandma, two steps ahead of him, handed him the Thermos.
Nels had piled a row of bales around the sleigh and scattered loose hay in between. Over that he piled blankets, with a buffalo robe on top to keep out the snow and weight down the coverlets. He and Grandma got Mom into the sleigh. They could hear Grandpa’s tractor out on the road, working away at the drifts, and grandma got down with Mom under Nels’s cold pile of blankets. As Nels called out to the horses and the runners crunched down into the hard snow, Mom remembers the smell of alfalfa hay in the close air around her and a weight of blankets pulled up to her chin. Between gusts of snow, she saw stars, one glittering with particular brightness. She nearly lost consciousness during each contraction, but in between she was sharp and lucid. They say the body retains everything, a catalog of every breath, every meal, every fright the organism you inhabit has ever experienced. The library of that cellular memory is one roomy place. But for the average person, we have the call numbers to only a fraction of the holdings. Not so for Mom and that night: everything so clear she can picture, hear, and smell it to this day. She kept praying. It was all she could do: pray the baby would come safe. Seeing that bright star in the clear sky, she felt in her heart that her prayers would be answered.
It was good that Grandpa called Nels because the last three-quarters-mile of road, where it rose to meet the highway, Grandpa parked the tractor and walked ahead of the team holding the bridles to urge on the big black animals. By then Josh was on his way. The harness bells sang as Nels’s horses broke through each new drift. “We’re almost there, Elizabeth, almost there,” Nels told Grandma. He saw the red and yellow flashing of the ambulance and road maintainer on their way up the hill. Nels’s sleigh reached the intersection. Grandma told Mom to hold on, but Mom’s time had come. Josh was born on the worn wooden bed of that bobsleigh with only my grandmother to help him into the world, born in the rough hay in the blowing snow as Nels Myhre’s team stood steaming from the effort of pulling the birthing suite uphill. The eerie thing was, Josh didn’t cry. When the sleigh broke through that last drift into the space the maintainer had just cleared, Dr. Razavi and one of the ambulance men climbed into the bobsleigh to help Grandma take care of Josh and hold up a light. Razavi was the one to tell Mom she wasn’t done yet, that there was another baby. And that’s when I was born. For all the extremity of his birth, Josh, wrapped in one of Nels’s blankets, was just fine.
Mom would look at me (one half of her December blizzard surprise, the one assisted into the world by the trained hands of a doctor of medicine under a battery-powered spotlight) when she got to this part of telling her story, and grab my arm. She said Nels Myhre and Grandpa were minding the team, the horses so agitated it took the two men to keep them from jerking the sled one way and another, its runners groaning against the snow, bells ringing. When he heard the news of my arrival, Nels said that the birth of two healthy boys in the teeth of that winter blizzard was a miracle, a sign.
“They’re meant to do something special in the world, Maria,” he said when he came round to the back.
Dr. Razavi looked Mom in the face and said he thought Nels was right. He took a gold ring off the little finger of his right hand and pressed it into her palm. “Take this, Maria. It will be a reminder to you of what Mr. Myhre says.”
Mom now, in the parking lot, over thirty years later, twisted the re-sized ring on the index finger of her left hand as she looked at Mikesh. I know she was thinking Nels Myhre, dead a decade back, was right. Josh had accomplished his special calling.
“The weather claimed Joshua at last.” She released the ring and took both of Mikesh’s hands. “Thank you for helping my son.”
“He told me to comfort